Deep Dish Conversations , livre ebook

DEEP DISH CONVERSATIONS
DEEP DISH CONVERSATIONS
VOICES OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN NASHVILLE
JEROME MOORE
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2023 by Jerome Moore
Published 2023 by Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moore, Jerome Lamont, 1990– author.
Title: Deep dish conversations : voices of social change in Nashville / Jerome Moore.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022061366 (print) | LCCN 2022061367 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505774 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505781 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505798 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Social change—Tennessee—Nashville. | Equality—Tennessee—Nashville. | Racism—Tennessee—Nashville. | Nashville (Tenn.)—Social conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC HN80.N2 M66 2023 (print) | LCC HN80.N2 (ebook) | DDC 303.409768/55—dc23/eng/20230210
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061366
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061367
To all the individuals who have dared to venture beyond the familiar and explore the unknown, even in the face of discouragement .
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dr. Sekou Franklin
Introduction
PART I. WE THE NORTH
1. Jamel Campbell-Gooch
2. Joshua Black
PART II. LIFE IN PRISON
3. Theeda Murphy
4. Calvin “Fridge” Bryant
5. Rahim Buford
PART III. THE ELECTED
6. Christiane Buggs
7. Judge Sheila Calloway
8. Dawn Deaner
PART IV. WHITE PEOPLE
9. Tim Wise
10. Will Acuff
PART V. PROTECTION OR HARM
11. Jorge Salles Diaz
12. Captain Carlos Lara
13. Marcus Trotter-Lockett and Emma Crownover of Safer Schools Nashville
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
DR. SEKOU FRANKLIN
Jerome Moore’s Deep Dish Conversations uses storytelling to examine Nashville in the twenty-first century. Storytelling comes in many forms: religious discourse, musical and literary expressions, protests, politics, and economic boosterism. In this book, storytelling embodies interviews with leading activists, intellectuals, and public officials, who share their thoughts on justice, transformational change, and inclusion.
To some extent, this book is an investigation of race and systemic policies that disadvantage Black and Brown residents in Nashville. Yet, it is also an exposé on place-making in a pro-growth, southern city networked to a global economy. Place-making describes how urban residents, workers, activists, intellectuals, and public officials establish new identities and hold on to existing ones. It investigates the built environments—old and new—such as the expanded or diminished housing stock, commercial development, and neighborhoods structured by an investor class, racial segregation, police-community relations, and workplace stability. 1
Trademarks have best characterized place-making and cultural identity in Nashville: Buckle of the Bible Belt, Music City, and Athens of the South. Today, Nashville is called the “It City,” as described a decade ago by Kim Severson in the New York Times . 2 The city and the surrounding counties are permanent destinations for northern and west coast migrants and high-value businesses seeking to find the new promised land of low taxes, southern cosmopolitanism, and a creative class.
However, the emergence of the It City raises questions about livability for residents at the bottom of the opportunity structure. How do working-class and low-wealth residents create a sense of belonging in a city that looks increasingly unfamiliar to them? How do residents confront the daily burdens of economic distress, wage suppression, austerity, neoliberal policies, and land-use deregulation? How do communities victimized by generations of hyper-incarceration find stability in the new Nashville? How do poor peoples’ movements advance equity-based policies in a city burdened by a fragmented political system that privileges powerful business interests? And where do working-class residents find affordable places to live if the cost of rent and housing has outpaced the rise in wages?
These questions are addressed in Deep Dish Conversations . Although the contributors arrive at different answers to the questions, each one extends a mirror to the readers to compel them/us to position equity at the forefront of place-making. By doing this, concerns about race, place-making, and resilience are tethered to Moore’s constant search for accountability and resolution to these complicated questions.
I first met Moore a decade ago when he was a student at Middle Tennessee State University. Despite the professor-student relationship, we were bound by a common thread. I lived in North Nashville—or “Out Norf” as local people called it—near his stomping ground of Pearl-Cohn High School. MTSU is only thirty-five minutes from North Nashville, but the two locations seem like opposite sides of the country. When I met Moore, gentrification had not taken hold of his community in North Nashville. The identities, rhythm, and ethos of the area’s working-class neighborhoods captured the essence of Black Nashville.
Notwithstanding our shared citizenship, I was not raised in the city. Unlike my immediate neighbors, I benefitted from a middle-class positionality. As an outsider, I leaned on Black students from North Nashville for information. My relationship with them was dialectical. I taught them political science, and they became my urban griots, regularly updating me about “street” politics in the community.
After graduating from MTSU, Moore joined the Peace Corps and moved to Paraguay. Once his tour concluded, he collaborated with community development initiatives in China, the Philippines, and Costa Rica. Along the way, he returned to Nashville to assist grassroots organizations such as The Contributor , a newspaper that represents the unhoused/houseless community. Based on these collective experiences, he created a community development framework that fuses grassroots organizing, racial justice, and international education.
Deep Dish Conversations captures Moore’s dedication to organizing and equity. It is just the latest publication about race, social class, and survival in Nashville. The Brookings Institution has produced two reports since 2018 that highlight Blacks in North Nashville. More recently, Steve Haruch’s Greetings from New Nashville: How a Sleepy Southern Town Became “It” City (2020), Praying with Our Feet: Pursuing Justice and Healing on the Streets (2021) by Lindsey Krinks, and Amie Thurber and Learotha Williams Jr.’s edited volume I’ll Take You There: Exploring Nashville’s Social Justice Sites (2021) provide refreshing accounts of Nashville in the twenty-first century.
Moore interviews thirteen influencers working on different fronts. The first section looks at Blacks who grew up in North Nashville at a time when the neighborhood was more than 90 percent Black. Jamel Campbell-Gooch and Joshua Black discuss growing up in a community shaped by Black businesses and colleges and universities yet plagued by unemployment and hyper-incarceration.
North Nashville has garnered national attention due to the previously mentioned Brookings’ studies. During Campbell-Gooch and Black’s formative years, the neighborhoods encompassing the 37208 area code had the highest incarceration rate in the country. 3 The expansion of prisons, draconian sentencing laws, over-policing, and aggressive prosecution made North Nashville ground zero for the nationwide expansion of the carceral state.
The second section of the book, “Life in Prison,” chronicles life through the lenses of Calvin “Fridge” Bryant, Rahim Buford, and Theeda Murphy. The men grew up in communities plagued by over-policing—Buford in northeast Nashville and Bryant in the south-side’s Edgehill public housing development. Both became community advocates after serving long prison sentences. Murphy is a police and prison abolitionist. She has also been a leading advocate for mental health justice.
Buford has spent his post-incarceration years leading Unheard Voices Outreach, an organization that advocates on behalf of formerly incarcerated persons. He also managed the Nashville Community Bail Fund for several years. Bryant was a high-profile target of the Drug-Free School Zones Act that was aimed at high-poverty neighborhoods from the mid-1990s to 2020. In addition to speaking against zero-tolerance policies, he created the Positive Inner-City Kids (PICK) foundation. Murphy’s most recent work is as the co-director of No Exceptions Prison Collective, an organization that works on sentencing reform and advocates for the closing of prisons in Tennessee.
Governance is the theme of section three. Moore interviews Christiane Buggs of the Metropolitan Nashville Board of Education, former Public Defender Dawn Deaner, and Juvenile Court Judge Sheila Calloway. Buggs provides insight on educational justice and community control of MNPS. She calls for an investment of monetary resources in low- and moderate-income schools, as well as community control of neighborhood schools. Her commentary raises an important concern. Although neighborhoods are diversifying due to gentrification, many white parents are intentionally choosing to avoid neighborhood and Black-populated schools.
Deaner and Calloway discuss the challenges with ameliorating injustices in institutions anchored by rules, procedures, and policies that have penalized poor people for generations. Abuse, family disarray, food insecurity, and adverse childhood experiences create additional barriers for people trapped in the criminal and juvenile justice systems.
City officials created restorative justice and decarceration programs to counter these problems. These include a client advisory board, a participatory defense project, workload reductions, community mediation, and a parental assistance program. Although these initi